On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as Awesome and StumpWM and XMonad go, I have some random notes
> on pros and cons which never went anywhere:
>http://www.gwern.net/xmonad-advocacy
I've decided to simply delete my page. Your
http://sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Comparison_of_extensible_window_managers
is better, and I haven't worked on it in ages, nor did it ever become
very good.
Here's the final page source, if anyone cares:
---
description: In what ways is the XMonad window manager better than the
Awesome WM?
...
# XMonad vs. Awesome
## pros
22:51:58 < jrick> in awesome, tabs are provided through a lua library
called Tabulous. unfortunately, you can't have a "tab titlebar" at the
top, so you don't know what other windows are in that group
in awesome, if you break your configuration and reload, nothing loads up
in XMonad, it just won't compile and you can continue using the old one
awesome config file keeps changing
awesome has many dependencies
awesome is less reliable than XMonad, which hardly ever crashes
awesome is GPL against XMonad's BSD
## cons
XMonad users have to setup third-party statusbars like dzen, while
awesome has a statusbar built in (this is related to the dependencies)
XMonad uses virtual desktop model by default, while awesome uses tags;
XMonad has tag extensions, though
awesome statusbar apparently can embed Lua applications in it; eg. a
(small) clone of Space Invaders. it can also evaluate lua code
non-issues
awesome uses XCB and XMonad Xlib; any speed advantage is unnoticeable
by the user and swamped by just about anything else (like app
rendering)
XMonad requires learning at least a little haskell syntax; awesome
requires Lua knowledge, but this may be more accessible
# XMonad vs. StumpWM
## pros
live hacking means you can hose your X session
minimal type safety - try and pray?
XMonad being compiled means easier and more reliable setup than
StumpWM - interpreter setup can be tricky
XMonad has smaller binaries and uses less memory than a SBCL with
StumpWM loaded; this leads to noticeable performance differences on
RAM-limited systems
## cons
XMonad cannot really do live hacking
different paradigms; possible to do static tiling in XMonad, but not
nearly as easy as with StumpWM
---
xmonad vs awesome http://www.ghosthacking.net/blog/entry/xmonad_vs_awesome/
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net